A brawl? Why, I do suppose there was a bit of a ruckus, but I assure you order has been restored, good sir. My deepest apologies for any inconvenience.

The incredulous, annoyed, infuriatingly amused look on Cormier’s face throughout the segment said it all. Just in case you didn’t get the message, however, he spelled it out for you.

“This voice that this guy is talking in, you guys should have heard him two minutes ago,” Cormier told ESPN’s Todd Grisham. “I mean, what in the world is this? This guy’s such a fake human being. He’s a fake individual.”

There it is again. That old standby, the label Jones has been stuck with for most of his UFC light heavyweight title reign, the one that seems to follow him everywhere he goes, no matter how he tries to ditch it.

Now, it seems, he’s given up and embraced it. He’s taken a natural ability to match his personality to his setting and made it so obvious that it’s become one of his things, like deleting tweets or cartwheeling into the cage.

For instance, look at Jones’ description of his first meeting with Cormier, during which he said he jokingly suggested that he could take the former Olympic wrestler down.

“Honestly, it was my way of trying to start a new friendship, a new relationship,” Jones insisted, before putting the blame on Cormier for being the one with an ego that was “through the roof.”

All Cormier could do was smile and shake his head, an earnest man struggling to get a grip on an opponent whose persona changes with the background scenery.

This is a trick that Jones has honed these last few years. He’s gotten a lot better at it, too, mostly by removing any attempt at subtlety from the equation. It’s as if he’s given up trying to trick people into thinking he’s just the nice, humble boy next door (who just happens to be the best fighter in the world), and is instead throwing his gimmick in their faces in order to rile them up even more.

Want to call him fake? You can, but don’t act like you’re peeking behind the curtain at this point. Instead of battling that accusation, Jones is now putting it to work for him. Once he figured out he couldn’t beat ’em, he went right ahead and joined ’em.

It’s kind of brilliant, really, and he couldn’t ask for a better foil than Cormier, whose sincerity meter is permanently set on high.

The more Jones plays choir boy while the adults are looking, the more Cormier sputters and chokes on his own rage. Cormier’s the straight man here, the guy begging the pro wrestling ref to turn around in time to see the villain tucking the brass knuckles back inside his shorts. Jones is the guy who knows that you know what he’s up to, and is going to keep on doing it anyway.

He tried the other way, the one where he tried to get us to go along with his version of who he was. We didn’t buy it. We said he was fake. He responded, You want fake? And bizarrely, it seems that yes, we do.

Or at least, we want it when we can feel like we’re in on it. We want to get mad about it, to be teased by it, all the way up until fight time. That’s when we want real. And when it comes to the actual fighting, as his opponents have learned, there’s nothing fake about “Bones” Jones.

ALBANY, N.Y. – MMAjunkie is on scene and reporting live from today’s UFC Fight Night 102 event at Times Union Center in Albany, N.Y., which kicks off at 5:45 p.m. ET (2:45 p.m. PT). You can discuss the event here.

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